MANHATTAN -- A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright will present a talk-performance and lead a question-and-answer session while at Kansas State University.

The talk performance by Suzan-Lori Parks will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 19, in Forum Hall at the K-State Student Union. The Q-and-A will be at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 20, in Nichols Theatre in Nichols Hall. Both events are free and open to the public.

Presentations by Parks, who is one of the most acclaimed playwrights in American drama today, have been described as part performance, part storytelling, always high energy and with an inspired sense of humor.

Named one of Time magazine's "100 Innovators for the Next New Wave," Parks is the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama, which she earned for the Broadway hit "Topdog/Underdog." She also has received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Award and a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts for drama. She has been awarded grants by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work also is the subject of the PBS film "The Topdog Diaries."

An alumna of New Dramatists, Parks teaches at New York University, is master writer chair for the Public Theatre and is working on her second novel.

Her visit is sponsored by the university's Ebony Theatre and Diversity Programming Committee. For further information please contact Marci Maullar at 785-532-6878 or marcima@k-state.edu.